Make Some Noise

The resurgence of political hip-hop.

The rapper and producer El-P is an elder statesman in a new wave of politically engaged groups.Credit Photograph by Zach Gross

Brooklyn’s El-P (Jaime Meline) and Atlanta’s Killer Mike (Michael Render) are both thirty-seven-year-old rappers, survivors of a kind of roisterous political hip-hop that seemed to have faded away. They are now joined to each other and to a growing cohort. El-P produced Killer Mike’s new album, “R.A.P. Music,” as well as his own album, “Cancer 4 Cure,” which Mike appears on. Both albums are remarkable and extend a recent, newly energetic streak of hip-hop records. Sometimes this energy translates as anger—Killer Mike is as mad at Ronald Reagan as the Dead Kennedys were more than thirty years ago—and sometimes it is a combination of volume and speed, in place of the swagger that dominates mainstream hip-hop. “Cancer 4 Cure” is a blur of syllables and sounds, most of which are roughed up and sharp.

Another partner in this subgroup is the New York trio Das Racist, whose member Heems put out a mixtape this year—“Nehru Jackets”—that’s twice as ferocious as most people’s official releases. The success of Detroit’s Danny Brown, who appears on “Cancer 4 Cure,” comes about partly just because he sounds so excited about being able to rap. Other artists who extend this moment of rambunctious engagement are Death Grips, from Sacramento, whose loony holler of an album, “The Money Store,” ended up on a major label, and the British veteran Plan B, who has given the England riots something close to an anthem. “Ill Manors” is a room-trasher built around a string sample from Shostakovich’s Seventh Symphony. Its chorus reduces plaints from London, Davis, and Daraa to a taunt that is equal parts fear and bravado: “What you looking at, you little rich boy? / We’re poor ’round here, run home and lock your door.” In hip-hop, at least, this is a moment for choosing sides, making noise and unlikely friends at the same time.

When El-P was first noticed, at the age of eighteen, he was the producer and one of two m.c.s in the trio Company Flow, whose records reached a cult audience on the independent label Rawkus, in the mid-nineties. Their label mates included prominent rappers such as Mos Def, Talib Kweli, and, for a song or two, Eminem. But Company Flow’s closer peers were a more obscure group of New York m.c.s, like the Juggaknots, the Arsonists, and a variety of rappers who orbited the record store Fat Beats, in lower Manhattan. Complexity, obfuscation, and attitude were the coin of this minor realm, though not at the expense of dumb fun. Company Flow broke up in 2000, and, as a solo artist, El-P has tended toward the misanthropic and the dystopian, much of his output more personal than the abstract verbal noise that his first group embraced.

Killer Mike started much closer to the spotlight, as part of the loosely connected Dungeon Family, in Atlanta, whose best-known affiliate is Outkast. Killer Mike’s single “A.D.I.D.A.S.,” from 2003, is a sprightly ode to sex, recorded with Outkast’s Big Boi. Though he was once on Columbia Records, Killer Mike is now a freelancer, like El-P (whose first group’s motto was “Independent as fuck”). For years, El-P released albums on his own Definitive Jux label, which is now defunct, but “Cancer 4 Cure” has been put out by the rapidly growing label Fat Possum. To demonstrate how fragmented the record business has become, “R.A.P. Music” is on Williams Street, a spinoff of Adult Swim, on the Cartoon Network.

“Cancer 4 Cure” is the less worked up of the two albums, by a slight margin. As a producer and an m.c., El-P gravitates toward oddities that fit inside one another. Tracks are streaked with unidentified screeches and blips, like shoe skids on a gym floor, and his lyrics are built more on rhythm than on narrative. On the sparse and menacing “Oh Hail No,” El-P delivers a string of internal rhymes, in an evenly hard voice: “Who, me? Every breath is a criminal, critical breach, bloody gums speech, beat minimalismo, make you spin like you sniffing that God particle, that purple cloak of the dusk an odd article originator decay, caterwaul brand, dawn treader rising, hollow man bop, gliding, shuffle through the tides of slime smiling, could be the high or just mind control dying.”

The sounds on “Cancer 4 Cure” are cold and anxious, as if every synthesizer and drum machine had been run through another processor and then shifted in tempo. It’s a generally dark world—“Sign Here” is an interrogation of an anonymous female—but there’s not much melodrama. The pop darkness of someone like Eminem, locked into a Christopher Nolan loop of chest-beating and hair-tearing, wouldn’t work here.

El-P may sound grim (he begins the album with a sample of William S. Burroughs saying, “Prisoners of the earth, come out, storm the studio”), but he’s not that different from the teen-ager who began recording twenty years ago. The video for the single “The Full Retard” shows El-P rapping in a Yankees cap alongside a squirrel puppet. The animal gets up to various kinds of illegal entertainment, including throwing a garbage can at a skateboarder.

Killer Mike’s album is like a series of garbage cans thrown at anyone and everyone. As abrasive as some of “Cancer 4 Cure” is, it seems as if El-P saved his most punishing music for Killer Mike. (The two met through Jason DeMarco, of Adult Swim.) “Big Beast” opens the album with an overlay of sharp and blunt beats, like blows, and the snare is possibly a combination of drums and actual gunshots. The nasal synth line from Fred Wesley & the JBs’ “Blow Your Head” (1973) is broken apart and reassembled, in a nod to hip-hop fans who know how often the track has been used. Mike is a steady shouter, his voice as loud as it can get without breaking or sounding shrill. Where El-P loves the nested and almost impenetrable, Mike chooses the pithy: “I don’t make dance music, this is R-A-P, the opposite of that sucker shit they play on TV.”

The most immediately arresting track is “Reagan,” for more reasons than one. It’s the album’s most sonically subdued song (though it is still a surly blend of oscillating sounds and hard snares) and its most politically complex. Though it uses samples of Reagan’s own speeches to demonstrate that he lied about the 1986 trade of weapons for hostages, it’s not just a rant against conservatives. Killer Mike also takes on the hypocrisy of rappers: “Talking about our car and imaginary mansions—we should be indicted for bullshit we inciting.” Mike runs through the Reagan era, arguing that the war on drugs was a pretext for police violence in general and, more specifically, “doing that surveillance on Mr. Michael Render.” Killer Mike’s disdain is nonpartisan—Bill Clinton, the Bushes, and Obama are all condemned as “talking heads telling lies on teleprompters.”

At Santos Party House, in Manhattan, a few weeks ago, El-P, Killer Mike, and most of the musicians on “Cancer 4 Cure” gathered for a very noisy celebration of the album, performing all the songs on the record, in order. Accompanied by Wilder Zoby, Little Shalimar, Shannon Moore, and Heems, El-P barked the lyrics as the overambitious bass frequencies rattled the beer bottles off the tables. The crowd was eager to welcome El-P back after the five years since his last rap album, “I’ll Sleep When You’re Dead.” Or maybe they were simply happy to lose themselves in the chaos. Before naming almost everyone mentioned here, El-P told the crowd, “Make some noise if you think this is a great time for hip-hop.” They did. ♦

Sasha Frere-Jones worked at The New Yorker as a staff writer and pop-music critic for ten years, beginning in 2004.